The stuff that makes up animals, planets, and stars is just a small part of the matter scientists believe is out there. Five-sixths of all matter in the universe is believed to be an invisible substance known as dark matter. We do not know what it is because it doesn’t interact with light, only with gravity and with the weak nuclear force.That force is responsible for nuclear decay, and in the case of dark matter, it might lead the substance to annihilate. This process is expected to release ionizing radiation: light that can strip electrons from their molecules – and that's where Jupiter as a dark matter detector comes in.One of the most common ions in the universe is the trihydrogen cation (H3+). That is a molecule made of three hydrogen atoms that have lost one electron. Now imagine you have a large reservoir of hydrogen, massive enough to interact with the elusive dark matter: You could theoretically measure the amount of trihydrogen cations and work out the properties of dark matter."We point out that dark matter (DM) can produce an additional source of H3+ in planetary atmospheres," the study authors wrote in a paper on the topic. "This will be produced if DM scatters and is captured by planets, and consequently annihilates, producing ionizing radiation."The scientists, Carlos Blanco of Princeton University and Stockholm University, and Rebecca Leane of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, looked at six hours' worth of data on Jupiter, three hours on either side of the planet's midnight. The data was collected by the Cassini mission as it passed by the night side of the planet in 2000Jupiter has a lot of hydrogen. It is very massive, the second heaviest object in the solar system. By looking at the night side, they looked at the portion hidden from the Sun. Sunlight can create these intriguing ions, so the approach reduces that contribution. The team found a signal – there is a certain amount of H3+  in the atmosphere of Jupiter’s nightside.Now, this doesn’t immediately mean that the signal is all caused by dark matter – it could be dark matter or other sources could cause it. But they can constrain some of the properties of the substance.The researchers believe that future observations might do even better. The European Space Agency’s JUICE mission can collect more sensitive measurements when it gets to Jupiter in the 2030s. It might also be possible to see the signal from more massive planets closer to the center of the Milky Way, where there’s more dark matter.A paper discussing the result is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The Left can’t stand that anyone would think Hunter Biden becoming a convicted felon waters down their talking point that Trump is a convicted felon. They worked hard to inflate some accounting entries for legal expenses into felonies. It’s much less serious in their minds that a crack addict lied about being an addict on a gun-purchase form so he was able to buy a gun that was later thrown in a trash can near a school. After Hunter Biden was found guilty of three felonies, Democrats tried to argue that having a “convicted felon” in both presidential families meant the Biden Justice Department wasn’t partisan or “weaponized.” Then the weaponizing began. Before the first presidential debate in Atlanta, the Democratic National Committee bought five billboards saying (in all capital letters) “Donald, welcome to Atlanta for the first time since becoming a convicted felon. Congrats – or whatever.” The Biden-Harris campaign also came out with a shameless ad slamming Trump with a litany of all the Democrat-prosecutor greatest hits: 34 felonies from Alvin Bragg, civil fraud from Letitia James, and department-store “sexual assault” in the nebulous E. Jean Carroll case. The Biden-Harris announcer proclaimed the race was a contrast “between a convicted criminal who’s only out for himself and a president who’s fighting for your family.” Biden’s for lowering health care costs, and making corporations “pay their fair share.” This partisan messaging was enhanced on MSNBC’s “Inside with Jen Psaki,” where the former White House press secretary touted this “very powerful” ad with a “very significant” budget.  She pressed deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks to provide a “fiery” spin from Biden and all his spokespeople, all the time. The pro-Biden media will find this to be eminently factual and unobjectionable. They won't question the Democrats any more than Psaki would. No one’s going to ask how all this "convicted felon" messaging clashes with Hunter Biden, who can be defined as “only out for himself,” except for enriching his family with millions from dubious foreign sources in China and Russia and elsewhere. They also claim Hunter Biden is "not running for office" and never took a White House job like Ivanka Trump, so you can't connect the father and son somehow. On the morning of the CNN debate, CNN's screen graphic implied any attack on Hunter is unduly personal: "Biden prepared for Trump to attack his family." It's painted as rude to bring up Hunter Biden. It was never rude to attack Trump's sons and daughters. But earlier that morning, CNN host Kasie Hunt asked Biden campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond if Biden would throw the "convicted felon" tag at Trump on stage. He said, hey, "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck. He's a convicted felon, and that's just who he is. And, by the way, he's a twice-impeached convicted felon. And so, it wasn't Joe Biden that did that. It was 12 American patriots who served as jurors that found him guilty, unanimously, on 34 counts." Their shamelessness extends to the forthcoming tax evasion trial for Hunter Biden in California. Unlike the gun case, this trial will deal with Hunter Biden's financial exploitation of his father's name when he was vice president. The gun case didn't connect to Joe Biden. The tax case clearly does. Democrats don't worry about how their "welcome, convicted felon" billboards might age. They count on a servile media to cry "no evidence" and "without evidence" about the Biden scandals from now until November.

Geoffrey Hinton made headlines for telling the BBC that artificial intelligence is an “extinction-level threat” to humanity. Hinton is no alarmist — he’s popularly dubbed the "godfather of AI" for creating the neural network technology that makes artificial intelligence possible. If anyone has authority to speak on the subject, it's him — and the world took notice when he did.In May of 2023, Hinton quit his decade-long career at Google to speak openly about what he believes are the existential dangers AI poses to us "inferior" carbon intelligences. Moreover, ChatGPT’s debut in November of 2022, just half a year earlier, had already sparked a global reaction of equal fascination and trepidation to what felt like our first encounter with an elusive technology that had now welcomed itself into our lives, whether we were ready for it or not.AI conjures up predictions of an Orwellian-like digital dystopia, one in which several oligarchs and AI overlords subject the masses to a totalitarian-like enslavement. There have been many calls for regulation over AI’s development to mitigate this risk, but to what extent would it be effective?Ironically, artificial intelligence was not elusive at all before November 2022; it had embedded itself into our lives long before ChatGPT made it en vogue. People were already unknowingly using AI whenever they opened their smartphone with facial recognition, edited a paper with Grammarly, or chatted with Siri, Alexa, or another digital assistant. Apple or Google Maps are constantly learning your daily routines through AI to predict your movements and improve your daily commute. Every time someone clicks on a webpage with an ad, AI learns more about his or her behaviors and preferences, which is information that is sold to third-party ad agencies. We’ve been engaging with AI for years and haven’t batted an eye until now.ChatGPT’s debut has become the impetus for the sudden global concern about AI. What is so distinct about this chatbot as opposed to other iterations of AI we have been engaging with for years that has inspired this newfound fascination and concern? Perhaps ChatGPT reveals what has been hiding silently in our daily encounters with AI: its potential or, as many would argue, its inevitability to surpass human intelligence.Prior to ChatGPT, our interactions with artificial intelligence were limited to "narrow AI," also known as “artificial narrow intelligence” (ANI), which is a program restricted to a single, particular purpose. Facial recognition doesn't have another purpose or capacity beyond its single task. The same applies to Apple Maps, Google's search algorithm, and other forms of commonplace artificial intelligence. ChatGPT gave the world its first glimpse into artificial general intelligence (AGI), AI that can seemingly take on a mind of its own. The objective behind AGI is to create machines that can reason and think with human-like capacity — and then surpass that capacity. Though chatbots similar to ChatGPT technically fall under the ANI umbrella, ChatGPT’s human-like, thoughtful responses, coupled with its superhuman capacity for speed and accuracy, are laying the foundation for AGI’s emergence. Reputable scientists with diverse personal and political views are divided over AGI’s limits.For example, the pioneering web developer Marc Andreessen says that AI cannot go beyond the goals that it is programmed with: [AI] is math—code—computers built by people, owned by people, controlled by people. The idea that it will at some point develop a mind of its own and decide that it has motivations that lead it to try to kill us is a superstitious hand wave.Conversely, Lord Rees, the former U.K. Astronomer Royal and a former president of the Royal Society, believes that humans will be a mere speck on evolutionary history, which will, he predicts, be dominated by a post-human era facilitated by AGI’s debut: Abstract thinking by biological brains has underpinned the emergence of all culture and science. But this activity—spanning tens of millennia at most—will be a brief precursor to the more powerful intellect of the inorganic, post-human era. So in the far future, it won’t be the minds of humans but those of machines that will most fully understand the cosmos.Elon Musk and a group of the world’s leading AI experts published an open letter calling for an immediate pause on AI development, anticipating Lord Rees’ predictions rather than Andreessen’s. Musk didn’t wait long to ignore his own call to action with the debut of X’s new chatbot Grok, which has similar capabilities to ChatGPT, along with Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s new AI chatbot integrated with Bing’s search engine. Ray Kurzweil, trans-humanist futurist and Google’s head of development, famously predicted in 2005 that we would reach singularity by 2045, the point when AI technology would surpass human intelligence, forcing us to decide whether to integrate with it or be naturally selected out of evolution’s trajectory. Was he correct? The proof of these varying predictions will be in the pudding, which is being concocted in our current cultural moment. However, ChatGPT has brought timeless ethical questions in new clothing to the forefront of widespread debate. What does it mean to be human, and, as Glenn Beck poignantly asked in an op-ed, will AI rebel against its creator like we rebelled against ours? The fact that we are asking these questions on a popular scale is indicative that we are now in a new era of technology, one that strikes at deeply philosophical questions whose answers will set the tone for not only how we understand the nature of AI but moreover, how we grapple with our own nature. Living life without fearHow, then, should we mitigate the risk of our worst fears surrounding AI becoming a reality? Will we, its current master, inevitably become its slave?The latter fear often conjures up predictions of an Orwellian-like digital dystopia, one in which several oligarchs and AI overlords subject the masses to a totalitarian-like enslavement. There have been many calls for regulation over AI’s development to mitigate this risk, but to what extent would it be effective? The government will hold all the reins to AI’s power if directed toward private companies. If directed toward the government, tech moguls can just as easily become oligarchs as their rivals in the government. In either scenario, those at risk of AI’s enslavement have very little power to control their fate. However, one can argue that we have already dipped our toes into a Huxleyan-like enslavement, in which we have traded seemingly menial yet deeply human acts for the convenience technology serves on a digital platter. An Orwellian-like AI takeover won’t happen overnight. It will begin with surrendering the creative act of writing for an immediately generated paper “written” by an AI chatbot. It will progress when we forego the difficulty of forging meaningful human relationships with AI “partners” that will always be there for you, never challenge you, and constantly affirm you. An Orwellian future isn’t so unimaginable if we have already surrendered our freedom to AI on our own accord. Avoiding this Huxleyan-type of enslavement — the enslavement to AI’s convenience — requires falling deeply in love with being human. We may not be in charge of regulating the public and private roles in AI’s development, but we are responsible for determining its role in our daily lives. This is our most potent means of keeping AI in check: by choosing to labor in creativity, enduring the inconveniences and hardships of forging human relationships, and desiring things that ought to be worked for outside our immediate grasp. In short, we must work on being human and delighting in the fulfillment that emerges from this labor. Convenience is the gateway to voluntary enslavement. Our humanity is the cost of such a transaction and the anecdote.

How do you play Viper in FF14? With very little defensive abilities and few options for utility, Viper seems like it’s going to be the glass cannon of the DPS jobs. The potential for massive damage is at the tip of your blade, but reacting quickly to mechanics and staying out of danger will separate a good Viper from a great one. This guide will give you the information you need to begin your journey as a Viper, including how to unlock it, your basic combos, using your burst window. One of the two new jobs introduced with FF14 Dawntrail, Viper is a dual-weapon wielding melee DPS that can fuse the weapon together to make a twinblade. Each iteration of the weapon has different uses, and fans of the melee DPS jobs are sure to enjoy the burst of DPS the Viper is capable of. Be sure to check out our guide on the other new job, the FF14 Pictomancer, so you can go into the MMO game with the best knowledge equipped. Continue reading FF14 Dawntrail Viper job guide MORE FROM PCGAMESN: The best MMOs, FF14 Dawntrail release date, FF14 Island Sanctuary guide

I’m not going to tell you that Payday 3 is now a great game. Starbreeze still has a long way to go in fixing and improving its flagship heist FPS, and if we’re ever going to talk about Payday 3 in the same breath as we discuss Cyberpunk 2077, No Man’s Sky, and the other great gaming comebacks, well, it’s probably going to take another couple of years. But things are getting better - and the community is responding. The new Payday 3 DLC, which follows Syntax Error, adds a fresh and much-needed extra heist. At the same time, Starbreeze is offering price cuts and free trials, and making forensic improvements to the shooter’s most contentious systems. Continue reading Payday 3 was a big disappointment, but now it deserves another chance MORE FROM PCGAMESN: The best co-op games on PC, The best crime games on PC, The best FPS games

Where are the FF14 Dawntrail Aether Currents? The in-game compass only works so well, and while many players enjoy finding them on their own, they can be a pain to locate. Some of them look accessible from one location but really require a completely different route. Whether the current is as simple as strolling up to it or at the top of what could be considered a jumping puzzle, we’ve got you covered, and you’ll be flying in Tural in no time. Each of these FF14 Dawntrail Aether Current locations are broken down by zone. Just like the Endwalker Aether Currents, there are six new zones in Dawntrail, each of which will have 10 overworld Aether Currents for you to attune to, and five quests that give them, totaling 15 currents for each zone in the MMO game's latest expansion. Continue reading All FF14 Dawntrail Aether Current locations MORE FROM PCGAMESN: The best MMOs, FF14 Dawntrail release date, FF14 Island Sanctuary guide

What is the State of Decay 3 release date estimate? Undead Labs officially announced the next State of Decay at the Xbox Showcase 2024, though we've known of its existence for a while, the reveal trailer gives us a bit more to go on. For those new to State of Decay 3, this survival zombie game mashup is an apocalyptic open world where you'll need to survive zombie hordes, all while building a secure base, keeping your people happy, and setting out on trips to hunt for resources to survive. It's a challenging third-person adventure, with city-building elements and some fun management systems. Continue reading State of Decay 3 release date estimate and latest news

Less investment, less entrepreneurship, lower incomes, and higher taxes affect many more than just ‘the rich.’

Blaming rising inflation on anything other than the federal government’s fiscal wastefulness and reckless monetary policies is misguided.

Making mutual male and female compassion ‘cool’ again.